I got away, with a wayward leap into an unknown boat, captained by a no-nonsense woman. Captain Mara was true to her word. She took me aboard, and I earned that passage every day by scrubbing the salt-stained boards, and coiling rope, and emptying chamber pots, and peeling vegetables.
But I didn’t mind it at all. Because it meant freedom. It meant escape.
I was lucky.
So although I slept in a swinging hammock with blistered hands and a capsized stomach, I was happier than I’d ever been during my entire time in Derfort Harbor. And after weeks of sailing, when the blisters had started to become calluses, and my stomach had learned to stop heaving for every chopped wave and blown-in storm, the ship arrived at Second Kingdom.
Captain Mara put me on a boat and paddled me right to the docks, and even gave me a coin to go with the others I had in a pouch sewn into my dress. She stood in front of me on that dock, where the call of gulls competed with the shouts of sailors, and she tucked the coin right into my shirt pocket that she’d given me and said, “You’ve got terrible sea legs. Best stay steady on solid ground, okay, gold girl?”
She left with a pipe in her mouth, already shouting to her crewmates over the bustle.
And I…I was in Second Kingdom, where the sand was white and the sun was baking, not a single cloud in sight to dump on the city in a flood of fishy rainwater. It was so unlike Derfort, but it was still a harbor, and I had no desire to stay anywhere near one of those.
So I found the first safe-looking passage I could with a family in a cart, and I was lucky, because they were happy to take me with them if it meant a little extra coin in their pocket. They had two young babies who I could help with on the trip, and I didn’t have to worry when I closed my eyes at night.
When I left them, I found a trio of sisters to travel with next, and that’s how it went, my luck staying with me from city to city, always finding women to travel with. I was gawked at, whispered about, some people came up and asked me why I’d painted my skin, but other than that, I was left alone, and I made sure to buy a cloak with a deep hood the first chance I got.
The landscape dried up the further I went into the desert, beaches and palm trees changing to sand serpents and cacti. But I kept going, trying to get as far away from the sea as I could. So long as I was near the ocean, it felt like I was still too close to Zakir West and Barden East.
My luck started to run out with my coin. The further I got from the harbor, the leerier people were of a strange golden girl traveling with them. I had to pay more for them to agree to let me hitch a ride, and that was if I could even get people to talk to me. The further I traveled, the more brutal the desert landscape and the heat became.
I thought it was hot before, but that was at least with the cold ocean air carried in from the beach. Out here, the sun was relentless, the wind hot. Despite the delicate appearance of the silky soft dunes, the sand felt as if it could burn through the soles of my shoes. Water was so expensive that a single bloom sliced off a prickly pear ate up my reserves for both water and food.
Despite all of that, I liked the sun. The way I could tip my head up and feel as if the warmth was soaking into my pores, cleansing each clogged up sodden year I’d spent drenched in Derfort.
But in the desert, though the sun blazed during the day, at night, temperatures plummeted. It didn’t matter that I layered every piece of scant clothing I had. My clothes were no match for the chill that came every time the sun set.
In such desolate terrain, there was nothing there to hold the heat, nothing to block the stripping wind, and it seemed to be an entirely different place when the sun went down. I’d woken more than once with scorpions creeping over my skin or sand serpents slithering in my hair. I’d woken with coyotes yipping in a frenzy as they went in for a kill or with other travelers shouting in a way that made me want to steer clear.
And then, the problem was my back.
I thought it was some kind of sunburn at first, the powerful rays baking right through my shirt and burning the length of my spine. It itched, and my skin peeled layer after layer, leaving me feeling raw.
After the itchiness came the pain. It throbbed from just between my shoulder blades all the way down to the very bottom of my back. It was gradual at first, then it became constant. So bad that I couldn’t even lie on my back to sleep or walk without wincing. And while it continued to peel and itch and hurt, I had to keep going. To try and ignore the pain as much as I could, even though I’d usually collapse into a wrung-out heap by the time I stopped traveling each day.